There was once a point raised by Mr. Orly Andico on a thread about the limitation if not total futility of Linux as a user-friendly desktop, to which Mr. Rogelio Serrano proposed a reform in the way we interact with computers to make them really user-friendly in line with the vision of the late Jef Raskin of the Macintosh fame.
Before Mr. Raskin passed away, he published a book "Humane Interface" which outlines his definition of such a system, implemented in Archy, unfortunately not open source compatible licensed. Check it out here: http://rchi.raskincenter.org/index.php?title=Home I for one define a really user-friendly system when we practically don't have to sit in front of it, just have to issue voice commands and receive synthesized speech for response, I believe these were being tried to be resolved or delivered by Festival and Sphinx. I tried installing them following this: http://www.linux.com/articles/41723 but it doesn't seem to work on my Ubuntu 6.10 laptop (it's the only PC at home and my sisters also use it so I must not whig it out) so I stepped aside and wait to get me a basic unit I fiddle on. If only OS/2 Warp still lives, it would epitomize my point. What do you think must an ideal user-friendly Linux distro be and what possible packages exist, preferably GPL or BSD-licensed, that basically or aims to provide such system? If we can produce such a distro, we as Filipinos can say we made something far beyond doing what popular distros already deliver (let's leapfrog the whole lot!). Thanks! -- Tito Mari Francis H. Escaño Computer Engineer and Free Software Proponent _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Read the Guidelines: http://linux.org.ph/lists Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
